The Art of Impossible: The Bang & Olufsen Design Story

The official 90th anniversary publication celebrating Bang & Olufsen, a consumer electronics brand whose excellence and innovation has shaped modern product design

Founded in 1925 by Danish innovators Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, Bang & Olufsen is one of the world’s foremost consumer electronics companies. For nearly a century, their audio products, television sets, and telephones have broken the established rules and conventions of product design, dictating visual trends and altering irrevocably the appearance of our homes in the process.

This book takes you behind the company logo and delves into the stories of each breakthrough, iconic Bang & Olufsen design―from their early audio equipment in the 1920s to the pioneering BeoLab 90 speaker system. Overviews of both the materials and the manufacturing processes used for each Bang & Olufsen model are complemented by profiles on the designers behind each innovative creation. Throughout, the company’s underlying philosophy remains unwavering: design must always serve a purpose. Featuring an extensive archive of sketches and prototypes, 300 specially commissioned photographs of individual products in various interior settings, as well as an exclusive insight into the models that never found their way onto the market, this is the definitive publication on a company whose design inventions are in a league of their own. 300+ illustrations